The Brooklyn Rail

In 1927, German physicist Werner Heisenberg introduced what would later become one of the most fundamental concepts of quantum mechanics: the uncertainty principle. It states that certain physical properties—most notably, position and momentum—cannot be simultaneously measured with perfect precision. The more closely one quantity is pinned down, the more the other slips away. This slippage is less a failure of scientific instrumentation than a structural condition of the universe in which we reside: a reality composed of indeterminacies and multiplicities rather than fixed coordinates.

This notion of uncertainty serves as one of the conceptual touchstones for Ayoung Kim’s current solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, Delivery Dancer Codex. The artist’s first US solo presentation brings together a comprehensive assembly of Kim’s ongoing “Delivery Dancer” universe, including Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (2022), Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse (2024), and Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver (2024). The impossibility of pinpointing movement, narrative, or temporality in a singular frame permeates the trilogy of works on view.

The exhibition opens with a triangular field of light cast across the central gallery. The three vast screens of Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse, suspended from the ceiling, form a prismatic enclosure overhead, while sloping ramps in orange-red hues tilt the viewer’s balance beneath. Projected across the screens are multiple streams of two protagonists—Ernst Mo and En Storm—living in a parallel universe created by the artist. They race on motorbikes through digitized, hyper-saturated landscapes that constantly dissolve into new terrains before the eye can fully register the frame. The two swerve, accelerate, and clash in brief, combative encounters while undertaking a delivery mission whose purpose remains intentionally unknown.

Across the main entrance of the third floor, we find a smaller room, where a circular calendar sundial—part of the installation of Delivery Dancer’s Arc: Inverse—comes partially into view. A dark, vertically oriented sculpture stands at the center, surrounded by patterned floor markings that function as a physical counterpart to the temporal dislocations unfolding on the screens. Here, time becomes something to be deciphered through inscription, shadow, and measurement, rather than the linear, second-by-second progression that typically shapes our contemporary life.

A passageway to the left of the main entrance links the screens and the sundial, before opening into the final room of the first section. One end of the corridor is sealed with a mirror, and the long wall beside it is covered with Evening Peak Time is Back (2022), whose GL (Girls’ Love)-inspired imagery depicts the two female protagonists of the “Delivery Dancer” series suspended between hostility and intimacy. Opposite the mural, two life-sized mannequins are positioned amid shattered glass, as if hurled out from the digital realm and frozen mid-motion. Past the sundial, the exhibition culminates with the second work of Kim’s trilogy, Delivery Dancer’s Arc: 0° Receiver. Curved, three-channel screens arc across the wall, now carrying Ernst Mo and En Storm into deserts and skyscraper cities. Reflected in the mirror opposite, the rapid motorbike sequences wrap the room in motion, pulling viewers into a journey where the riders’ true cargo appears to be time itself.

The second half of the exhibition unfolds in the adjoining room, featuring Kim’s earlier works from the exhibition Syntax and Sorcery, which was presented at Gallery Hyundai in Seoul in 2022. Included here are Ghost Dancers A, Stipulation, and Delivery Dancer’s Sphere (all 2022)—works that form the narrative prologue to the “Delivery Dancer” series. Mirrors, which appeared sporadically in the first section of the show, become more prominent here, with an entire horizontal wall clad in reflective surface. The mirrored plane captures the viewer’s standing figure alongside the helmets of Ghost Dancers behind and Orbit Dance 10 O’Clock (2022) from the ceiling—planetary, suspended forms made of super-mirror, brass, and nickel—subtly shifting the room toward a more surreal, celestial ambience.

One of the most interesting aspects of the exhibition is the cadence between each work. The viewer is met almost immediately with steady streams of illumination, flashing chromatic gradients, and rapid shifts between live-action footage and AI-generated scenes. This heightened sensory stimulation recalls Fredric Jameson’s description of late capitalism’s fractured, “schizophrenic” sense of time. These bursts of intensity, however, are well punctuated by sculptural pauses—objects and mirrored surfaces acting as brief commas within the trilogy’s continuum. Emerging from a post-pandemic moment that accentuated the relentless rhythms of gig-economy labor, Kim’s “Delivery Dancer” series visualizes a world in which temporal flow is constantly “breach[ed] infinitely into all directions,” as the character Ernst Mo remarks. In this sense, the exhibition folds back into the uncertainty that underpins its own premise: a universe where movement, temporality, and orientation remain in perpetual flux. Gathered together, these elements form an intentionally unstable constellation, one that mirrors the precariousness and indeterminacy at the core of contemporary life.